Tamara Balezina

Tamara Iosifovna Balezina (1913 to 2010) was a Soviet Union-Russian microbiologist who played a key role in the discovery and production of penicillin in the Soviet Union. Born in Starobilsk and trained at the Kuibyshev Medical Institute, she defended her doctoral thesis on penicillin in 1944. In 1942 she was tasked with setting up a laboratory to study penicillin, where she selected a mould strain close to Penicillium crustosum that gave a usable drug by 1944. From the 1950s she worked on how interferon is produced in cells and in 1972 patented a method of making it in animal cell cultures, and from 1956 to 1975 she worked at the Institute of Virology.